[HN Gopher] When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
___________________________________________________________________
When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
Author : benbreen
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-04-02 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| aorloff wrote:
| https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Libr...
| viccis wrote:
| If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him.
| Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's
| really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch
| break. The common recommendation would be to try out _Tlon,
| Uqbar, Orbis Tertius_ and see if you like it. If so, it 's part
| of _Labyrinths_ , which is (in my opinion) his best collection of
| short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's
| _Collected Fictions_.
|
| Regarding the content of this interview:
|
| >If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read,
| and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every
| sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
|
| This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I
| don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.
| Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world
| without Borges.
|
| In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume
| viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than
| possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical
| skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead
| end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism
| is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of
| creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so
| with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this
| be?)
| kunzhi wrote:
| Did you ever read House of Leaves?
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I've tried, but never made it all the way through. Cool to
| realize the author's sister (Poe) made a hit song "Haunted"
| when inspired by the same house iirc. There's my random fact
| of the day.
| theshaper wrote:
| Let me give you some probably bad advice. Skip the Johnny
| Truant parts and skim past all the creative layout stuff.
| It's just decoration, and decoration is often suspicious.
| Focus on the core story. It's fantastic. There's a shot at
| building a full-on American mythology, Lovecraft-style,
| from that alone.
|
| Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and
| embrace the substance. - It also nods to the mystery behind
| The Navidson Record.
|
| I wish I had known this when I first read it.
| cvz wrote:
| Tlon is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps
| appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember
| basically anything about it once I've finished reading.
| integralof5y wrote:
| Borges and Herbert Simons are two great minds, but their
| conversation is not deep since is mostly shared view about the
| meaning of human and machine intelligence. Today, with LLMs we
| have a tool to explore the relation between intelligence and
| language, between number of parameters, neural nets architectures
| and much more. So that conversation give us no new insight but is
| delightful to share time with such great people.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read,
| and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every
| sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
|
| Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works
| of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly
| understanding their life that the words themselves came out of
| you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden?
| What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able
| to write that one day.
| uoaei wrote:
| This reads exactly like the plot of a story Borges might write,
| maybe someone more familiar with his ouevre can shine a light
| on which stories of his touch on this kind of theme.
| theobreuerweil wrote:
| I think the comment is referring to "Pierre Menard, Author of
| the Quixote".
| dwringer wrote:
| Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people
| should read more Borges!
| jhedwards wrote:
| There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw
| Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a
| poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their
| culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture,
| so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from
| the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a
| wonderful and hilarious story.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges
| already wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the
| Quixote."
| awithrow wrote:
| It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original
| poster is referencing a specific Borges short story called
| "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which he published in
| 1939. It influenced a number of other notable authors
| raminism wrote:
| ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre
| Menard, perhaps?
| jl6 wrote:
| Hofstadter should have written _Godel, Escher, Bach, Borges_.
|
| I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka
| (the messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in
| the small print on page 7 of this:
|
| https://lab6.com/4#page=7
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Hofstadter was defiantly a fan of Borges' work.
| https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-1-borges-and-i...
| kouru225 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of his short story Funes the Memorious. Link:
| https://ia801405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfThe...
| mentalgear wrote:
| Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to
| the original (in the background).
| gwern wrote:
| I see no hint of an audio recording having been made, much less
| surviving & digitized, in the original article's description:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo...
| It's too detailed to be retroactive notes by Simon or Borges,
| so I would guess Borges's secretary or a student simply
| transcribed it as they went.
| benbreen wrote:
| Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be
| interested by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have
| tried to lay my hands on the original version of the
| conversation, as I am sure Simon did, too. I contacted
| Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article explains,
| participated in the meeting. He is a professional translator.
| I asked him for the original version, and he replied on
| WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am
| unable to provide you with the information requested.' My
| hypothesis is that Zadunaisky translated the conversation
| directly from the recorded version and that this original
| version has been lost."
|
| My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school
| reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the
| tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina,
| though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty
| low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg
| made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one
| where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty
| well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss,
| but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.
| 101008 wrote:
| Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him
| in the original language I think his English translations lack
| the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish
| is my first language.
| theshaper wrote:
| Hey! Opino lo mismo!
|
| (I agree!)
| netsharc wrote:
| Considering Borges' stories (some written as if they're reports
| of actual events), I had to wonder for a long while if this is a
| "reporting" of a "what if" scenario. It would've been a great
| homage to him.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-02 23:00 UTC)